Website lets residents compare local schools

Friday

Nov 23, 2012 at 6:00 AM

By Jacqueline Reis TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

Local education officials often say the city’s schools are doing well compared with other urban districts, and an option the state added to its website this month puts some numbers behind that assertion.

The District Analysis and Review Tool, or DART, on the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website ( www.doe.mass.edu) lets people compare schools and districts to a small peer group and lets users compare any school or district in the state to any other one.

The information used to be available only as a downloadable spreadsheet. In recent weeks, the state has added it to the “School/District Profiles” section of its website. To find it, call up a district or school profile, and then look for the DART tab on the right.

The data isn’t an exact match between the two formats. Worcester as a district, for instance, comes out at the top of its peer group when the numbers are crunched through the “Profiles” section. On the downloadable spreadsheet, the numbers are ever so slightly different, and Haverhill edges out Worcester.

Still, parents can see how their child’s school is stacking up or compare schools they are thinking of using. Besides test scores, the data include per pupil spending, average teacher salaries, transportation costs per pupil and other measures. (Worcester, it turns out, spends less per student than the state average, has higher teacher salaries and spends less on transportation.)

The state plans to add graduation and dropout rates and other information, according to JC Considine, director of board and media relations at the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

David Perda, Worcester public schools’ chief research and accountability officer, said the district has been using the spreadsheet data for years, but it had the drawback of having to be discarded and updated. The Web version should do that automatically.

The data are a handy rebuke to people who claim a school cannot improve because its student population is more challenging than another’s, because the tool identifies schools with similar populations, Mr. Perda said.

“You can then use it to motivate your staff,” he said. “This can be done. Look at the students’ growth in this school, and they have the same kind of kids that we have.”

Charts rarely capture everything, however. For instance, Worcester’s Burncoat High School gets compared not only to the other comprehensive high schools in the city but to Worcester Technical High School. Worcester Tech, the highest achieving school in that group, is also the only school in the city with selective admission.